Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Josephine baker biography essay
Josephine baker biography essay
Short biography of Josephine Baker
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Josephine baker biography essay
Josephine Baker was an exceptional woman who never depended on a man. She never hesitated to leave a man when she felt good and ready. In her lifetime she accomplished many great things. She adopted 12 children, served France during World War II, and was an honorable correspondent for the French Resistance. She fought against fascism in Europe during World War II and racism in the United States. She grew up poor and left home at an early age and worked her way onto the stage. Baker was more popular in France than in the states. Audiences in America were racist towards Baker and that’s when she vowed she wouldn’t perform in a place that wasn’t integrated. Freda Josephine McDonald was born on June 3, 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, …show more content…
She realized she would never have to depend on a man for financial stability. A habit she might have learned growing up without her real father. She remarried in 1921 to Willie Baker, whose last name she decided to keep. She remarried again in 1937 to Frenchman Jean Lion, from which she obtained French citizenship. Then a last time in 1947 to a French orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, who helped to raise her 12 adopted children. She was never again officially remarried but spent the rest of her life with American artist Robert Brady after exchanging marriage vows in a church in Acapulco, …show more content…
She loved animals, and at one time she owned a leopard, a chimpanzee, a pig, a snake, a goat, a parrot, parakeets, fish, three cats and seven dogs. Her career flourished in the integrated Paris society; when La Revue Nègre closed, Josephine starred in La Folie du Jour at the Follies-Bergère Theater. Her jaw-dropping performance, including a costume of 16 bananas strung into a skirt, gained her celebrity status. Josephine in 1927 earned more than any entertainer in Europe. She starred in two movies in the early 1930s, Zou-Zou and Princess Tam-Tam, and moved her family from St. Louis to Les Milandes, her estate in Castelnaud-Fayrac,
helped support the struggling couple. They divorced in 1942. She lived in Carmel Valley, CA after and died February 8, 1983.
Eleanora Fagan (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), professionally known as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz artist and artist musician with a vocation traversing almost thirty years. Nicknamed "Woman Day" by her companion and music accomplice Lester Young, Holiday affected jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, firmly propelled by jazz instrumentalists, spearheaded another method for controlling stating and rhythm. She was known for her vocal conveyance and improvisational aptitudes, which compensated for her restricted range and absence of formal music instruction. There were other jazz vocalists with equivalent ability, however Holiday had a voice that caught the consideration of her crowd.
Debra Lynn Baker had a nice life. Her early stages in Wichita, Texas were a commonplace out of some lazy screenwriter mind. She was young and good-looking woman that married her childhood sweetheart, Tony Baker in 1975 and remained married for 20 years. They had a son, Charles in 1976 who played football in high school. The Bakers were a nice family.
Over and over again critics write about Nina Simone’s power and charisma throughout the Civil Rights Movement. She sang the words of an entire movement, “All I want is equality/ for my sister, my brother, my people, and me./ Yes, you lied to me all these years”(Simone Mississippi). She sang out for her entire race, and with a “smoky- toned” voice, when four young girls were killed in a church bombing (Lewis). She sang “Will my country fall, stand or fall?/ Is it too late for us all?/ And did Martin Luther King just die in vain? (Simone Why?) after the death of MLK. Nina Simone… a singer with many different voices, a singer who denies categorization, a woman who is genre-less to prove a point.
In the year of 1940, she created an all black dance company, known as “Ballet Nègre.” This dance company quickly began touring around 1943. This was unusual at the time, because the time period that she was popular in was when African Americans were discriminated against. However, since she was a very popular entertainer, she used this to show that she had a very serious intent on tracing the origin of black culture (“Katherine Dunham”). Ironically, during the time Dunham was doing the work she is most known for, modern dancers and political liberals did not know exactly how to react. They made sure not to refer to the people on her company as Black, Italian, Jewish, Irish, or any other race. This is because they were afraid of being deemed as being racist if they labeled her dancers by their ethnicity or
Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr. did have their similarities as leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, but there were vast differences as well. Their differences allowed the Civil Rights Movement to be more encompassing while fighting for the same cause. Baker and King both grew up in the South, had religious upbringings, had at least some level of a higher education, and were public speakers. What set them apart was their differing opinions on who contributed to social change, and how. This is expressed through the varying social classes they depended on, importance placed on reputations developed through public associations, and nonviolence tactics that used to fight for equality. Even though Baker and King had different methods in which
Louis Armstrong was born to William and May-Ann Armstrong, on August 4, 1901; although it is rumored he was born on July 4, 1900. He was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana where as he went back and forth between his 'grandmother’s house and his mother’s house. He had on sister named Beatrice who was just two years younger than him who he looked after as a young child. When he was seven he begin singing on the street for a little money with his friends and that is where he got his nickname “Satchelmouth” which was later changed to “Satchmo” because of his smile. While playing in the street he met a trumpeter by the name of Bunk Johnson who taught him things he knew about music and the trumpet. In his memoir he said, “But somehow all that jive didn’t faze me at all, I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn” (Armstrong). Trouble didn't meet Mr. Armstrong until 1912 during a New Year’s Eve celebration. Louis Armstrong fired a pistol into the air and was immediately arrested and he spent the night in a jail cell. He was sentenced to a Colored Waif’s House, where he stayed for 18 months.
After her graduation from Shaw University, Baker migrated to New York City on the eve of the Great Depression, determined to find an outlet for her intellectual curiosity and growing compassion for social justice. She was deeply moved by the terrible conditions she witnessed on the streets of Harlem during the 1930s; scenes of poverty, hunger, and desperation.
Her maid was completely unaware of the incident and got suspicious when she witnessed that Marilyn’s bedroom lights were left on all night. She called the police and shortly after they arrived, she called Ralph Greenson, who on arrival, couldn't bust down her bedroom door. He snuck through the backyard and broke her window. He found Marilyn dead, lying in her bed. They removed her body and debated that her time of death was approximately between 9:30-11:00 that night. They later stated in the paper that her death was a ‘probable suicide’. Her date of death was August 5, 1962, in Los Angeles, California, her home city. Following her death, she became one of the most celebrated of all actresses.
After her divorce she began singing with Noble Sissie’s Society Orchestra. Through out their tour she had to endure harsh racism having to sleep in tenement boarding houses, the bus and even once in circus grounds. Soon after that, she toured with Charlie Barnet’s Outfit and became the first African American to tour with an all white band. She was their feature singer and considers this to be the beginning of her success.
Singer/actress Lena Horne's primary occupation was nightclub entertaining, a profession she pursued successfully around the world for more than 60 years, from the 1930s to the 1990s. In conjunction with her club work, she also maintained a recording career that stretched from 1936 to 2000 and brought her three Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; she appeared in 16 feature films and several shorts between 1938 and 1978; she performed occasionally on Broadway, including in her own Tony-winning one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she sang and acted on radio and television. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her position as an African-American facing discrimination personally and in her profession during a period of enormous social change in the U.S. Her first job in the 1930s was at the Cotton Club, where blacks could perform, but not be admitted as customers; by 1969, when she acted in the film Death of a Gunfighter, her character's marriage to a white man went unremarked in the script. Horne herself was a pivotal figure in the changing attitudes about race in the 20th century; her middle-class upbringing and musical training predisposed her to the popular music of her day, rather than the blues and jazz genres more commonly associated with African-Americans, and her photogenic looks were sufficiently close to Caucasian that frequently she was encouraged to try to "pass" for white, something she consistently refused to do. But her position in the middle of a social struggle enabled her to become a leader in that struggle, speaking out in favor of racial integration and raising money for civil rights causes. By the end of the century, she could look back at a life that was never short on conflict, but that could be seen ultimately as a triumph.
She had hard time with her husband. When she was thirteen she was married to Willy Wells. They stayed together for two months, but Josephine never saw Willy as a significant partner as she once broke a bottle of beer on his head. She tried to forget this marriage. Fortunately, when she was fifteen years old, she married to another man who named is Billy Baker. Billy liked her when he saw her at the local theater. Then they got married, and she was happy that she was able to change her last name into Baker. For the first time, she no longer gets the insecure feeling from her last name. However, she still hasn’t got the perfect “personal life”. Billy’s mother disapproved of Josephine because her skin was darker than her husband’s and because she was a chorus girl with apparently no family to talk
Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1903. She always had strong opinions, and “followed her own mind”. However, she was influenced by her grandmother growing up, and this contributed to her sense of social justice and racism. Her grandmother, who had once been a slave, told her granddaughter stories of her own years in slavery. Her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man picked by her slave owner (SNCC). This story and others like it inspired Baker throughout her life, and led to many of the incredible things she did. Ella and her parents moved to Littleton, North Carolina when she was eight. Sadly, her father stayed behind for his job. The public schools for black children during this time were not sufficient. Her parents wanted to send her and her brother and sister to boarding schools. They both worked hard to acquire this. Finally, when Baker turned fifteen she was sent to Shaw University, in North Carolina (SNCC). Being the bright, intelligent student that she was, she had excellent grades, and was top in her class. She expressed an interest in being a medical missionary, but this would not have been realistic. After graduating in 1927 as valedictorian, Baker headed to New York City (Richman). She was quite brilliant and hoped to find some opportunities in New York that would help her do something worthwhile with her life.
The movie Lady Day: The Many Faces Of Billie Holiday paints an interesting, and thought provoking portrait of one of jazz and blues most charismatic, and influential artists. The incomparable talent of Billie Holiday, both truth and legend are immortalized in this one-hour documentary film. The film follows Holiday, also referred to as “Lady Day” or “Lady”, through the many triumphs and trials of her career, and does it’s very best to separate the facts from fiction. Her autobiography Lady Sings The Blues is used as a rough guide of how she desired her life story to be viewed by her public. Those who knew her, worked with her, and loved her paint a different picture than this popular, and mostly fictional autobiography.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain Ohio. Toni Morrison’s father, George Wofford, worked primarily as a welder, but held several jobs at once to support his family (Toni Morrison Biography 1). As a welder, he was hardworking and dignified man who took a great deal of pride in the quality of his work and always made sure that his dress game was on point (1). He was also a well-dressed man, even during the depression and later started to become racist (1). This made Toni Morrison start to mistrust all white people (1).